Musings on the Ways We Lose Our Way in a Culture of Scarcity — and How We Find Our Way Back to Connection and Meaning

Daniel Radcliffe in "Every Brilliant Thing" asking an audience member up on the balcony where we were sitting to read out one of the "every brilliant thing" messages

As a child, I was uncomfortable with the way my father idealized others
 
From an early age, I remember feeling vaguely uneasy as I watched my father idealize people in his life: friends, colleagues, public figures. It was different from simply praising someone for their gifts or accomplishments. He exaggerated their abilities. He didn’t quite see them as people, but as icons.
What confused me was that, in person, he interacted with people normally. The idealization happened mostly when they were absent.
 
The difficult thing was that he also did this with me. Other people would tell me all sorts of glowing things my father had said about me, yet he almost never said these things directly to my face.
 
I used to do it too
 
Over time, I began to notice a similar tendency in myself. I would admire someone from afar, or sometimes someone in my own life, who seemed to possess qualities I felt I lacked. Instead of letting their example inspire me to cultivate those qualities in myself, I folded their gifts into a story about my own inadequacy.
It was as if there were only so much beauty, intelligence, creativity, or success available in the world. If someone else possessed it, then there was less left for me.
 
I suppose this is what people mean by a scarcity mentality.
 
Where did it come from? Mostly fear. A sense of lack. A feeling that I was missing something essential. My mind spun endless “if only” narratives, and then fear itself prevented me from taking the steps needed to change the story.
 
But eventually I began to wonder: what if fear itself could become a starting point? What if it could become an invitation to grow into something new?
 
A perspective that helped me: examining the hidden “meta-narratives” we live by
 
Recently I read an article by my mentor, Sharon Blackie, that helped illuminate this struggle for me.
She writes about the way we in the modern West, especially in the United States, are caught inside a powerful cultural narrative that many of us barely recognize because it surrounds us so completely. It is a story rooted in competition, individualism, and scarcity. The only acceptable story becomes the heroic individual triumphing against impossible odds, succeeding through struggle and separation from others.
Within this narrative, success belongs to the individual alone.
 
This way of thinking forgets how deeply interconnected we actually are.
 
Blackie explores the myths and archetypes underlying these cultural assumptions. She writes:
 
“A curious mixture of magic and alchemy is required to create a story – with all its depths of symbols and its archetypal imagery – that buries its way into a person’s heart, and then the heart of a community, and then the heart of a whole culture. And magic and alchemy have to be learned. And given time to work. You can’t short-circuit the process. We’re too quick these days to want to fix things. But some things can’t be rushed. They have to grow. Slowly. And deeply.”
 
The central insight for me was this: within the dominant cultural narrative, we forget that we are always connected, to other people, certainly, but also to animals, plants, landscapes, and the larger living world that sustains us. We have become so disconnected from this understanding that we scarcely notice its absence.
 
Coming back to my father’s story
What if this cultural narrative partly explains my father’s struggle?
What if, out of a deep sense of inner unworthiness, he felt compelled to surround himself, psychologically at least, with people he considered “successful”: famous people, wealthy people, brilliant people? Perhaps proximity to them helped him feel more valuable himself.
 
I sometimes wonder whether this struggle can be especially difficult for men, who are still so often taught that life is fundamentally competitive, that worth must be earned through status, achievement, and dominance. If someone else has something, then there is less available for me.
 
And if my father felt unable to embody the kind of success he admired, perhaps idealizing others became a way of attaching himself to it indirectly.
 
Seeing these fears, both his and my own, within a larger cultural framework helps me hold them more gently. It becomes easier to begin loosening their grip.
 
The misfits
Blackie argues that it is often the misfits who first find their way out of these destructive narratives. They cannot comfortably inhabit the “dog-eat-dog” worldview around them. In a sense, they are forced to imagine and live differently.
 
It is not merely about inventing a new story, she says. It is about living a new way of being.
That takes courage.
 
It means reminding ourselves, and one another, that we do not have to absorb the toxic beliefs surrounding us. We can choose to live as participants in a nourishing web of interconnection. We can support and uplift one another. We can allow ourselves to be imperfect, vulnerable, uncertain, and even strange.
 
Because from the perspective of the dominant culture, this way of living may indeed look strange.
But vulnerability and sensitivity are also the places from which creativity grows. They are part of what makes us fully alive.
 
As Blackie writes:
“And this is my point: we can’t change the metanarrative by sitting around trying to think up new stories. We do it by not only perceiving in new ways, but living in new ways. By being the subjects for those new stories. More than that – by being the stories. We ARE the stories. That’s how it’s always been.”
 
Every Brilliant Thing
I recently saw the play, Every Brilliant Thing, starring Daniel Radcliffe. Radcliffe certainly did not need to take on a production like this. He is already enormously successful and financially secure. Yet something in the play’s deeply life-affirming spirit clearly drew him to it.
 
The performance itself is remarkably vulnerable and collaborative. Throughout the play, audience members participate directly in the story. One person even plays his love interest.
I found myself inspired not only by the play’s message, but by the fact that an actor with so much status chose to embrace something so intimate, risky, and dependent on connection with others.
The play centers around a list of “every brilliant thing,” all the small joys in life that sustain us. The protagonist creates the list while trying to cope with his mother’s severe depression and suicidality. He searches for ways to hold onto meaning and hope, and he does so not alone, but through relationships and community.
 
Even the structure of the performance depends upon community. Though Radcliffe is the only actor formally onstage, the audience becomes part of the story itself. The result is a palpable sense of connection and shared humanity.
 
And perhaps that connectedness is everywhere, once we begin looking for it.
I think we know this instinctively as children. But as we grow older, we slowly forget. We absorb the surrounding messages of competition, perfectionism, and scarcity. We begin to believe that life is about proving ourselves worthy rather than participating in a shared human experience.
 
But we can choose otherwise.
 
We can resist through the way we live.
 
It takes courage. It takes persistence. But what other choice is there, really?

One of my "brilliant things!" Having tea, scones and mini sandwiches at "Alice's Tea Cup" in New York City with my daughter!